27 – THE WORLD LIVES DIFFERENT LIVES

The rain pelted against the windows of their little hut upon the hill. The roof was made of soil and covered in grass, while the walls were of wood and stone, filled with green. The windows were the most visible part of it all, and yet they were made so that light could not escape them from inside, but only come in from outside. They were basically invisible from afar.

The inside of the house was cozy and warm. While the wind howled, Tommy rested happily on a couch by the hearth of the fire. Calvin rested and meditated, after having spent considerable mass and energy to make their shelter. He was not low on energy, per se, because his nanites were more than capable of transforming their mass into some less energy dense materials and gorge themselves with the excess energy. It more like physical exhaustion that came with the effort. He knew he could keep going, but he rested now that he could. Perhaps this was similar to how magic worked, but he wasn’t sure. Now that the path of the arcane was closed to him, the little he remembered of the art from before he was like this felt… wrong. Like it should never have been, like a dream of something impossible that crumbled before the cold calculating gaze of science. But cold it wasn’t, because the untold possibilities it promised him with just a little more understanding were astounding.

Marceline was reading a book from Earth. Calvin had produced it along many others as part of the furniture for the house, and she picked it up after noticing the strange title. After some time, she put down her copy of Twilight, which was promptly reabsorbed by the house and reappeared on the bookshelf, and went to her room. Just to be sure Calvin, who did not need to sleep, decided to see what she was up to.

He sat on the couch by the fire, and with his mind called to him the information from the nanites in her room. He felt his cheeks grow red, and immediately turned his attention away as the image of her naked body impressed itself in his memory. He checked if he was blushing, and found that indeed he was, thanks to his very accurate avatar body. Deciding that he didn’t want to risk peeping another look, he went to meditate, but didn’t activate the perceived time dilation. After some time, seeing that it was still deep in the night, he produced a book about mathematics and began to read though it. Slowly at first, and then ever more slowly as the topics discussed within became more alien and complicated. But both he and the nanites were quite satisfied by the time it was morning because it was ever clearer just how many doors there were that could be opened though understanding the universe.

They all gathered at the large wooden table early in the morning, and Calvin served them some breakfast. This time, he decided to dig through his archives of memories from Earth and offer them some special cuisine.

“Strange towery… thing.” Marceline looked at the stack of discs in front of her.

“Pancakes.” Said Calvin, and offered her some, after drowning them in maple syrup.

She took a cautious bite, before going all in. Meanwhile, Tommy ate silently. He seemed pensive, and often enough his eyes darted to the adventurer next to him, when he thought she would not see him. He tried to guess what her business with her father and the guild would be, and how it would all play out with the other thing that he knew was going to happen as soon as they reached the capital. By how the accords between them were, he knew that she will have to follow them in their escape from the city, assuming that everything went as he predicted, but he was unsure as to how she would feel about it.

After breakfast, they rested for a while and then left the little shelter without hurry. Calvin reabsorbed all the nanites that he could into himself, and then they were off. The same pattern repeated itself another two nights, until he saw in the distance a large grove of trees.

“What is that?” Asked Tommy.

His eyes were ensnared by the otherworldly beauty of what laid before him. In the valley below, upon the horizon, he could see the shape of a huge tree. It was so tall that it seemed to touch the sky, and the clouds drifted and parted ways around the massive trunk. Below the swirling branches and the thick bark, thousands of silver and golden trees made the grove. They seemed to shine with radiance and life, and looking upon them was like gazing in the mirror of a still lake, into a long-forgotten age of the past.

“That is where the elves dwell.” Said Calvin. “It means we’re very close now.”

Even Marceline could not help but stare at the eerie beauty of the elven grove. It was far away, in a small depression of the land that was already plunged in shadows, but the shadows seemed to soften and melt when they touched the mighty girth of the tall trees. The gold and the silver that blossomed from their stems was of a brilliance undiminished by the lack of light, shining with its own internal beauty. The curtain of night was slowly closing, and the world became dark.

Calvin, for the first time in his life, looked at the magnificence of the magic of the elves with new eyes. While he could not see, nor feel the magic that sustained their little corner of paradise, he could see just how strange and unnatural it was. While it was not science, nor could it ever be explained thought the science of Earth, this was a part of the universe he lived in just as much as science was. It was not unnatural, then, just unknown. And it was beautiful and tempting, like a flower waiting to be picked and smelled, that lured with its fragrance the wary traveler and promised him eternal youth and rest. The mystery, the secrets waiting to be uncovered. He needed to come back here, and spend some time to glimpse at what laid beneath. But not now. He forced his gaze away, and it lingered for a moment more. Truly, it was a small window into a land outside of time, where laws of nature were as fuzzy and whimsical as the elder days when the universe was young, and magic ran rampant. The strange, alien eons called to him, and he felt the curiosity of a child, and the hunger of a trillion nanites starved for knowledge inside of him.

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He sighed. Perhaps after the Capital, after he met his parents and returned to his old life, then he could visit the elves. Not as the hero, of course, and while he knew that this was going to make the meeting very difficult to obtain, he was sure that he could find a way.

After this little stop, the rest of the way was easy and fast. They traveled fast on the kingly roads that served the Capital, among the many different people and animals that went to and from in a frantic motion of bodies. At length, they were at the main gates. This deep in the heart of the kingdom, the mighty gates were swung wide open for everybody to cross openly. They stood encased in thick walls of stone and steel, engraved with runes that seemed to shimmer and hum with hidden power. Calvin felt strangely watched, and it was as if his whole being had been laid bare before the power of the tall defenses. The very walls, towering as they were, appeared as if they were growing taller and taller, reaching up to the clouds and beyond.

A shadow fell upon the land. The cliffs of stone that even now were still growing mightier and darker had obscured the sun. Light ran away from them scared, leaving the world itself in the dark night devoid of stars. Calvin felt unable to move, and the pressure that was ever greater gripped at his very soul and mind. He could hear echoes of faraway foes and hidden danger, and a sense of foreboding was growing in him.

Then, all of a sudden, the illusion vanished. He was back again in the sunlit world, and the walls of white and black were there, immobile and pale in comparison to what he thought he had seen. Looking beside him, he saw that his two companions were likewise stunned, mouths agape in wonder and a little fear. But he didn’t speak of this, nor did they, for they all understood that this was nothing more than an illusion, a party trick to instill terror and fear for a kingdom, and its king.

***

The sorcerer looked at the small blue screen before his eyes. A ‘notification’, his master called it, coming from a magic he could not even begin to fathom. But his trust in his master’s magic was unconditional. Never before had the magic of his lord failed him in its purpose or strength. All failures were utterly his and his alone.

And this, he noticed with a sigh, was one such failure. The notification told him that, clearly and beyond a doubt, the aberration was still alive. Francis had failed in his mission. But not all was bad. There was a silver lining in the news. Another sigh escaped his lips, and the air turned to white wisps of smoke in the frigid room. A soft muffled cry came from one of the bodies dangling from the metal hooks.

He kicked the body in the groin, and barely a sound came from the person who barely still inhabited it.

“Later, wannabe Questgrinder#23, I have another matter to attend.”

He left the room, and the heavy metallic door closed behind him with a loud clang. The cold disappeared, and he dismissed his personal shield; one of his first accomplishments with the plentiful but terribly diluted dark energy from among the stars. He leisurely walked towards the balcony of his tower, and leaned against the dark stone.

The notification was once again floating in the air next to his face, and he willed it open to read the contents.

While the aberration was still alive and well, at least the matter of Tower#773 was no longer his concern. It wasn’t there anymore, destroyed using its own defensive measures against itself. A clever move, he had to concede. But his eyes were glued to a little line of text, which made it all bitter once again. Just before it blew up, the compound beneath the tower had activated seemingly by itself.

“The aberration did this, no mistakes there.” The sorcerer muttered.

And, of course, he knew that the aberration had now weaponized the very thing that was supposed to keep it in check. It was a problem that beckoned a swift response. He could not leave it as it was, because right now the enemy had a free weapon at their disposal whenever they wanted, but at the same time, he could not remove the safety feature from the towers, otherwise the nanites would once again begin spreading like a plague. With radio, they could just operate remotely from the safety of a mountain or a hidden place impossible to reach. While the former hero would take some time before he realized that this was the best way, once he did then he would become so much more difficult to handle. And that was not what his master had in mind for the former hero.

His plans were different.

The sorcerer sighed. For now he would live it like this. The towers could keep the radio in check for a little longer, and by the time he was forced to deactivate them, he would have an overwhelming response ready to be deployed as soon as the nanites even tried to bunker up. While his master’s plans were so elusive that he could not even hope to catch a glimpse of their grandeur, he knew his role. And he had no doubts. He merely had to raise his sight to the sky, and there he could see all the proof he needed of his master’s genius. Overhead, hovering in the air in all its splendor, was the headquarters of his master.

A flat, circular saucer of concentric rings. A hull of metal that sparkled against the sun, indestructible and alien. Trailing behind the saucer, two detached nacelles rested in the air defying gravity, and underneath it a huge deflector the likes of which could rarely be seen among the multiverse completed the majestic spaceship. It was truly something else, something out of this world. Either by summon, or by building it himself, his master was now master of this fearsome tool of destruction, and that alone spoke more than enough.